The Sonnets and Other Poems Read Free Page A

127–52, by contrast, explore the poet’s relationship with a mistress, a dark-complexioned and sexually voracious woman who has “raven black” brows. Sometimes her dark beauty is wittily defended against the blond Elizabethan ideal, but more frequently these poems are filled with self-abnegation, misogyny, a lingering sense of the sour taste that comes after sex, and disgust at the way in which the body rules the spirit. The woman is accused of infidelity, including an apparent affair with the “man right fair” who is the poet’s “better angel”—this seems to allude back to the purported relationship between “friend” and “mistress” in the earlier sequence. Some of the “dark lady” poems are searingly honest about the deceptions that may occur between lovers: “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust…Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Others are dazzlingly playful, notably 135–36, with their multiple punning on senses of the word “Will,” including a persistent play on Shakespeare’s own name. The final two sonnets are imitations of a Greek epigram about the fire of love being quenched in a cool well, with clear allusion to the Elizabethan custom of taking mercury baths as a cure for syphilis. The implicit suggestion is that the poet has been venereally infected by the “dark lady.”
    The surviving documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life is not very exciting. Beyond the bare facts of birth, marriage, parenthood, and death recorded in parish registers, most of the surviving papers are legal and financial documents: real estate transactions, records of his shareholding in his theater company, payments for performances at court, a steady stream of minor litigation. Not the sort of thing to reveal the heart and soul of the artist. What we know about the life does not help us to understand the greatness of the work. At the same time, since plays are plays, in which feelings and opinions belong to the characters and not the author, the dramatic works cannot be used as reliable evidence of the nature of the man. Indeed, one of the things most valued about Shakespeare is what John Keats called his lack of “personality”: his ability to mask his own face, to dissolve himself into his characters, to be now Othello and now Iago, now Prince Hal and at the same time Falstaff.
    Shakespeare’s sonnets are a source of endless biographical fascination because they seem to be the one work in which he speaks in his own voice. “Scorn not the sonnet,” William Wordsworth would write two centuries later: “With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” So it is that the sonnets are often believed to bear a wholly different relationship to Shakespeare’s biography from that of the rest of his literary work. There is, however, no intrinsic reason why a sonnet—a highly artificial literary form—should not be a dramatic performance just as a play is. It may perfectly well be argued that for an Elizabethan poet to dash off a sequence of sonnets was a kind of exercise, a proof of artistic skill akin to the work of a composer writing a set of variations on a musical theme. If Shakespeare could imagine Hamlet and Romeo and Viola, he could also have invented the “plot” and “characters” of his sonnets. Robert Browning responded to Wordsworth’s claim: “If so, the less Shakespeare he!” Maybe the sonnets are best read as assays of Shakespeare’s art, demonstrations of the gift of seemingly effortless facility that the Italian theorist of courtship Baldassare Castiglione called
sprezzatura
: “A singer who utters a single word ending in a group of four notes with a sweet cadence, and with such facility that he appears to do it quite by chance, shows with that touch alone that he can do much more than he is doing.”
    We do not know whether the sonnets are dramatic performances written out of sheer
sprezzatura
or poetic reimaginings